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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4920 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

Unlike that of the Federal Parliament, the ACT Legislative Assembly's budget is at the whim of the Executive. The Federal Parliament has the parliamentary departments Appropriation Bill. So, I suggest that there be a separate appropriation for the money needed to run the Assembly and its committees. I also suggest that the Speaker have control of that part of the budget needed to run the Assembly building, the secretariat, the committee system and the parliamentary library. As for the parliamentary library, Mr Speaker, I would like to see it withdrawn from the Department of Urban Services and made a specialist parliamentary library. I would like to increase the budget for both acquisitions and staff. I would like to see research officers appointed by the library and made available to do independent research for the committees and for non-Executive MLAs. I would also like to explore the possibility of strengthening links with the ANU and the University of Canberra to turn the library into a government research centre of national standing.

Mr Speaker, these are some suggestions; but, as I said, the system I am working on is incomplete. What we have examined is how to improve the system within the existing rules that run this place. The review proposed by the Government can go much further and examine the whole box and dice. This is a worthwhile exercise and an opportunity which I will support, no matter what motivated the Government to call for it. As I said earlier, Mr Speaker, I support the review and wish Professor Pettit and his team well. But I will make one last point. The main problem with the system as it stands is the two-party system. The key problem with the Assembly is the same thing that is wrong with every other parliament around Australia: It is dominated by the two major parties - the two old parties - and they ensure that everyone else is locked out of the system. The two old parties do not want real reform of government because they have designed the system to suit themselves. For the old parties, governing Canberra is a game about power for their party.

What we want to do, Mr Speaker, is get the Assembly working for people, not for the parties. We do not need a parliament of adversaries where an opposition opposes for no other reason than that it wants to become the government. We want a system where more commonsense prevails. That will happen only if we have more Independents not bound by the constraints of an organised old party. Mr Speaker, only the people can make this reform. We want to ensure that real people have a real voice in it. If anyone wants an example of how the system should not work, they need look only at any debate between the Government and the Opposition at any time over the last nine years of this Assembly's life. The exhibition so far in this debate would do, Mr Speaker. But, as I have said, neither I nor Professor Pettit can design a system that will fix the problem. Only the people can change that - at the ballot box. Maybe, to borrow a phrase, it is time they did just that.

MR CORBELL (11.56): Mr Speaker, there is no doubt that parliament is, and should always be, the keystone of our democracy, because only in the parliament can the will of the people be formally expressed in a way without violence, without going outside the appropriate democratic processes. But, Mr Speaker, what we have seen in the establishment of this review into the governance of the Territory has, unfortunately, itself had the hallmarks of an undemocratic process. Indeed, what we have seen on the two occasions when the Chief Minister has raised this issue - when she first announced it and when she moved this motion today - is a complete absence of any willingness

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